“Happy Days” ... Or, The Other Side of the Coin (Part Two)

(Editor’s note: The first segment of this multi-part series begins a discussion in part on how the place of the black man is marginalized in the American experience.  …  . In Part Two, that discussion continues.)

Prior to the Civil War, in the nostalgic era of Gone With the Wind, each Southern state has enacted a “slave code,” which defines the slave owner’s power and the slave’s status as the white man’s “property” --- and designed to control the slave’s life.  Of course, the slave code has been written and enacted by the same Southern white elite group which has authored the Bill of Rights.  Thus, the slave code could be viewed, correctly, as the Bill of Rights, only upside down!

In the years before and after the Civil War, with the shadow of secession looming larger and larger over the national landscape, black Christian churches are constructed exclusively in the South, since Southern white churches refuse blacks from participation. 

By the turn of the 20^th century, states have replaced the slave code with so-called “black codes” --- also known as “Jim Crow” laws --- to legalize racial separation.  These laws have the practical effect of restricting African Americans' freedom and compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt.  Although free, blacks become the subject of the legalized segregation of the races, “separate but equal” facilities, so the US Supreme Court decides in 1896.

Legalized segregation is meant to demonstrate once and for all the superiority of whites over blacks as evidenced by a system of control of one race over the other.  Incredibly, even the simple act of a black man whistling at a white woman, walking down a public street, is deemed illegal in the South in this context.  Black codes are enforced more strictly in and come to define the South, stifling its economy. 

Even so, a steady trickle of African Americans choose to leave the South, primarily in search of jobs in northern cities.  But the public mood is still such that when Theodore Roosevelt extends the first invitation to a black man, Booker T. Washington, to a White House dinner, T.R. is publicly lambasted for his troubles.  This is at a time when statistics show that black lynchings in the South are still at a rate of approximately 100 per year.  That comes to a lynching every 3-4 days.

By 1918, near the end of World War I, a “Great Migration” has led half a million southern African American citizens north to the “Land of Hope.”  But their hope is fleeting.

Following World War II in 1945, President Harry Truman can only watch with chagrin, as newly returning black veterans --- who have earned the right to the same sort of progress at home with their blood, too, spilled over the battlefields of Europe --- are beaten mercilessly by their white overlords as soon as their feet have left the transport vehicles and landed back on Southern soil.

The black man would be made to remember his place, such that by the end of World War II America’s greatest economic problem remains the South.  Not to be deterred, President Truman desegregates the US military in 1948, accepting the challenge to advance what is described as the “Double V” campaign.  As applied to African Americans, it is said to be a double victory over racism both in Europe’s Nazi Germany and at home in the US.

Symbolically, Truman is the first president to issue a formal invitation to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to receive a White House address.

By the early 1950s, however, it is factually determined that for every $150.00 in federal spending at “white schools,” only $50.00 is spent at their counterpart “black schools.”  And so, after a stormy, 50+ year existence, the US Supreme Court finally overrules legalized segregation in 1954, deciding that “When it comes to opportunities in education, separate but equal is inherently unequal.”

Hailed as a “Second Emancipation Proclamation,” the Supreme Court’s decision overruling separate but equal educational facilities and ordering the desegregation of the nation’s public schools is one of the most significant decisions of the 20^th century.  It is rendered unanimously, 9-0 in favor. 

Nevertheless, President Eisenhower, the former military General and hero of the World War II battlefield, is reluctant to throw his support behind the ruling and embrace the landmark change.  The president actually comes on record as saying the decision is a “mistake” and “not a great moral issue.”  The president continues: “I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decision.”

(Editor’s note: The third and final segment of this multi-part series takes readers behind the impregnable walls of the Senate filibuster in the US Congress to the present.)

-Michael D'Angelo

“Happy Days” ... Or, The Other Side of the Coin (Part One)

(Editor’s note:  This is the first segment in a new multi-part series. …)

Ten years following the Mayflower, a prominent landholder named John Winthrop organizes what would become a 20,000 strong, great migration to New England by 1642.  Before landing, Winthrop delivers a sermon entitled “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which he asserts:  “We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.”

Does today’s America seem like a City upon a Hill, as the metaphor suggests?  Or is America more like a gated community trying to divert its eyes from those in need?

The historical context is sobering.  Over a period of 350 years, some 10 million blacks would be transported to the Americas.  This fact stands as a testament to the greatest forced migration of a people against their will in the history of Western Civilization.  Consider that when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, nearly 50% of the inhabitants of his home state of Virginia, fully 500,000, were African American.  Yet, the interpretation of his political writings in those days seem to ignore that particular demographic reality.

A recent film depicts Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night of 1776 and the ensuing Battle of Trenton.  The film and the valiant struggle it represents are emotionally moving, but the eerie feeling about this version of history is that there are no blacks in it.  No black civilians, no black soldiers, no black slaves or body servants --- just white people bravely and busily creating a new nation.

The cast of Happy Days!

Similarly, the popular TV show, Happy Days, depicting life in the good old days of the 1950s, also has no black characters.  The “other side of the coin” is not be depicted, almost as if it doesn’t exist.  Perhaps, it is wishful thinking. 

Indeed, Jefferson’s own writing indicates that his earliest memory is of being carried on a pillow by one slave riding on horseback to the day he’s lowered into the earth in a coffin made by another.  Yet, he finds it impossible in his domestic culture to effectively denounce, let alone attempt to eradicate, the institution of slavery, in a life cushioned by the subjugation of others.

In 1807 the US legally abolishes the slave trade, which only seems to make slave “breeding” more desirable and profitable to their white overlords.  In the mid-19^th century, the question lingers on what to do with the African American slaves, if freed.

Many in the South favor a mandate to simply send them back to Africa.  The nation of Liberia in western Africa is founded, but only for those who wish to return to a part of their ancestral homeland.  But the plan is scuttled, when it becomes understood that African Americans like it here, too, and aren’t going anywhere again, involuntarily.

Yet following the conclusion of Civil War hostilities through the Reconstruction Era, Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most famous black abolitionist, notes in 1882 that the newly freed slave “was free from the individual master but a slave to society.  He had neither money, property nor friends.”

One may be assured that a man who is guaranteed the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” after toiling away, displaced for hundreds of years as free labor --- possessing neither money, property, nor friends --- faces a stark reality indeed.

(Editor’s note: The second segment of this multi-part series continues this survey from the turn of the 20^th century to the two World Wars to the turbulence of mid-century.)

-Michael D'Angelo